Poetry

Hunting Down the Monk

Drawing from her work in comparative religion and cultural anthropology, Adrie Kusserow offers a collection of portraits of Westerners in the East and Easterners in the West struggling to relearn and relive their ideas of culture, religion and God. These poems expose the human craving for the nourishment of a spiritual life. Celebrated poet Karen Swenson has written the Foreword.

What I Want

for Robert

More than any other time
I love you most
when you are in the garden,
your body held in bowls of sun,
the slim throats of the iris
stretching toward you,
the heads of peonies bumping into you.
They want you.
We all want to be touched by you.

From the window I watch
your hands skate the soil,
smooth the bumps.
Red, yellow, and blue skins reach.
Listen: You are opening the earth,
the colors popping like parachutes.
My whole body leans from its hungry axis.
I wait my turn.

©BOA Editions, Ltd 2002

Available editions:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Price: $15.00

FormatPaperback

Publication DateDecember 1, 2022

ISBN1-929918-23-2

$15.00

About the Author

Adrie Kusserow is a cultural anthropologist who works with Sudanese refugees in trying to build schools in war-worn South Sudan. Currently an associate professor of Cultural Anthropology at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, Kusserow earned her PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University. She is the author of two collections of poetry, both published by BOA Editions, Hunting Down the Monk (2002), and Refuge (2013).